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In the evening Szczesny went with me up to the fence surrounding the ghetto. It was a high, wooden fence guarded by a Polish policeman. Szczesny went up to him and said, ‘Please let this lady in, because her mother’s in there.’ The policeman didn’t want any money – he slipped a plank aside and I went into the ghetto.
I remember that terrible impression; that was how you might have imagined hell, pitch black on the streets, you couldn’t see anything, the streets full of people, some of them were sitting on the sidewalks and stretching out their hands. I had my parents’ address; Leszno [Street] was very close by, but I completely lost my sense of direction.
All the time I was in the ghetto I was dazed – I think it was necessary to defend myself from it. In the end I made it to my parents. They lived with several other families in one apartment.
Mama opened the door to me. I didn’t recognize her. She had had typhus and become a tiny, very thin old woman; she had never looked like that. It was only when she said ‘Hania’ and I heard her voice that I realized it was Mama. My parents and my middle brother Mietek were there; the elder Rysiek lived with his wife separately.
My parents had a tiny room; in the corner there was a stove that they cooked on. There was nothing to eat in the house. I took out my money and the Weigl vaccine to sell. Mietek went down and bought some food.
My family was living off the parcels that they got every week from Mama’s sister Pola, who had been very rich and had managed to salvage the remnants of her fortune. That was all they had. Rysiek had sold lilac on the street in the spring. After that he worked at the brushmakers’.
The very next day somebody got me a job in the ghetto. A rich man with a kind heart had set up a small orphanage in an apartment on Leszno Street, close to Bankowy Square, and took children off the streets there.
He had equipped it with beds and bed-linen, and had food, clothes and simple drugs such as aspirin and ointments brought in. I don’t remember his name. He took me and another woman on [as carers]; we lived there, and got food.
We didn’t earn anything. There were no more than 20 children. The man collected children that he found on the streets and brought them to us. Many of them died at once; it was already too late to save them.
That was the worst for me, when they died. They thought they were in heaven – washed, bathed, in bed, in the warm – but it lasted a day or a few hours. There were a few orphans that weren’t so emaciated yet, and they stayed with us.
I remember that terrible impression; that was how you might have imagined hell, pitch black on the streets, you couldn’t see anything, the streets full of people, some of them were sitting on the sidewalks and stretching out their hands. I had my parents’ address; Leszno [Street] was very close by, but I completely lost my sense of direction.
All the time I was in the ghetto I was dazed – I think it was necessary to defend myself from it. In the end I made it to my parents. They lived with several other families in one apartment.
Mama opened the door to me. I didn’t recognize her. She had had typhus and become a tiny, very thin old woman; she had never looked like that. It was only when she said ‘Hania’ and I heard her voice that I realized it was Mama. My parents and my middle brother Mietek were there; the elder Rysiek lived with his wife separately.
My parents had a tiny room; in the corner there was a stove that they cooked on. There was nothing to eat in the house. I took out my money and the Weigl vaccine to sell. Mietek went down and bought some food.
My family was living off the parcels that they got every week from Mama’s sister Pola, who had been very rich and had managed to salvage the remnants of her fortune. That was all they had. Rysiek had sold lilac on the street in the spring. After that he worked at the brushmakers’.
The very next day somebody got me a job in the ghetto. A rich man with a kind heart had set up a small orphanage in an apartment on Leszno Street, close to Bankowy Square, and took children off the streets there.
He had equipped it with beds and bed-linen, and had food, clothes and simple drugs such as aspirin and ointments brought in. I don’t remember his name. He took me and another woman on [as carers]; we lived there, and got food.
We didn’t earn anything. There were no more than 20 children. The man collected children that he found on the streets and brought them to us. Many of them died at once; it was already too late to save them.
That was the worst for me, when they died. They thought they were in heaven – washed, bathed, in bed, in the warm – but it lasted a day or a few hours. There were a few orphans that weren’t so emaciated yet, and they stayed with us.
Period
Location
Warsaw
Poland
Interview
Anna Lanota
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